Internet Advertising

Cindy Love

Hi there,

Im looking for information about website promotion and advertising.I was reading another post on the topic but some of the terminology went above my head! Im not from a programming or computer background so I am more interested in the general 'how to' set up adveritisng,maintaining it,and from your own experiences(success' and challenges) and rates?

Perhaps there is a website some of you chaps/chappettes mights know of that could help?

Thanks for your time-Happy Friday and have a lovely weekend.

whiskeyman

http://www.medialive.ie
Click on the "internet" button on the nav bar on the left.
Some good info there.

Happy Friday to you too

leftofcentre

http://www.clickz.com
http://www.imediaconnection.com
http://www.adverblog.com/

Branoic

Try Google AdWords - https://adwords.google.co.uk

rogue-entity

As long as you dont use graphical ads, I spend my free time blocking them.
Personaly I think the amount of ads on TV are just two much with those Jamster/Ringtoneking ads being the worst offenders. There is nothing more annoying then websites with too much ads and/or popup/popunder ads which really drove me to firefox.

Anyway, enough of my opinions, good look with your ads, I second the use of Googles adwords.

SHAKESPEARE_SIS

http://www.bruceclay.com/

growler

one of the most useful sites I've found is www.e-consultancy.com which is a long standing site dedicated to online marketing, it's worth paying the subscription to get the latest thinking and product reviews. Some good free resources there also.

magpie

Surely MONGREL magazine doesn't need help with advertising?

ballooba

Cindy,

Google AdWords is the best source of advertising. Might also be a good source of revenue for you.

d-arke

http://www.inspiration.ie - a dublin based internet marketing agency
http://www.voodoo.ie - same again

i havent actually used either of their services, came across their sites while doing some research. im sure they could do the job. plus their irish so thats handy.

d-arke

http://www.inspiration.ie - a dublin based internet marketing agency
http://www.voodoo.ie - same again

i havent actually used either of their services, came across their sites while doing some research. im sure they could do the job. plus their irish so thats handy.

edbyrne

Hi Cindy,

There's actually loads of things you can do for marketing on-line. (You'll hear marketing people call them 'channels'!)

- Search Engine Marketing (means using Google and Yahoo! programs to buy ads for keywords you select)
- Newsletters: build a list of emails and send them targeted mailings with information, promotions etc. OR buy an ad in a newsletter (although I'm not sure that's really a great strategy)
- Blog: I'm a big believer in social media. Create a blog on your site to inform people about interesting things happening in your industry, tips and tricks you know, and new developments. It's not a company shout-box, but rather an expertise journal. Get's people to bookmark your site and come back (if the content is good, interesting and updated REGULARLY!)
- Comment: Find other blogs and forums (like this one!) to see what people are saying about your company/product/industry and leave informative comments. It'll build you and your company as a expert, and therefore the port-of-call for your product or service.

Sorry ... getting a bit carried away there ... there's plenty of other things you can do as well - all depends on time & budget.

On using marketing companies - yeah, go for it, just make sure they're not selling you THEIR FAVOURITE services, but rather a custom, consultative service just for you. And get trained on certain activities - you don't need to pay a company for the simple things, once you know how to do it.

Hope this helps!

Hells_Belle

ballooba wrote:

Cindy,
Google AdWords is the best source of advertising.

I have to say I really disagree with that. The best source of advertising is Google, but you're much, much better off investing in a really well-coded, search-engine friendly website to get top-ranking, free Google results. The traffic you can get from that method can't be bought for love nor money.

AdWords are what you use when your search engine results are pants. They're a band-aide for a site that isn't performing properly.

Like Ed, I'm a huge believer in business blogging. It's fun, it's free (after setup costs), it allows you to build relationships, and again, it's good for search engine rankings.

growler

remain wholly unconvinced by blogs having any effect on the bottom line, they would obviously be useful in some markets ( technology principally) but how does one measure an ROI for the time spent ?

Also I think people tend to distrust information that is unbiased, and if it is a business blog the info is biased ( or should be, in favour of your own productss / services). Likewise whilst you may employ / be an expert in your field, you probably have a real job to get on with , if you are such an expert why are you spending so much time on a forum / blog ? also , while you may be the de facto expert that doesn't necessarily mean that your company is the best one to do business with. As you can tell I'm very skeptical about blogs in business !!

Hells_Belle

growler wrote:

remain wholly unconvinced by blogs having any effect on the bottom line, they would obviously be useful in some markets ( technology principally) but how does one measure an ROI for the time spent ?

Marketing and advertsing are not the same thing. A blog, IMHO, is best seen as a marketing tool. A good blog can increase your brand awareness and name recognition; a well-written blog can position you as an authority in your niche. A blog also allows you to interact with your customers and potential customers; to speak to them, and to hear back from them immediately. A blog is also an excellent PR vehicle, and can be critical in crisis management.

Personally, I don't think there's quantifiable ROI in that, but I still see it as an excellent investment in your company.

My dog business is a brand new venture. At the moment, the blog gets more traffic than the store, but we are using our blog as a networking tool and the blogsphere is beginning to link back to both our blog and our business.

It is also worth noting that Google loves blogs. The more blogs who link to your site (or your blog) the better your rankings. It depends on your product or service, but when the blogsphere is buzzing about your product or service, there's a lot of SE payoff.

If you want to talk advertising, I'm a believer in blog advertising, too. I will always, always go for a good BlogAds campaign before spending a dime on Google AdWords.

There are two caveats to all of this:

1. The blog has to be well written, by someone who really, really understands that a blog is not the place to park your pimpmobile.

2. The effectiveness of blogs in Ireland on the Irish market, I'm iffy on outside of the tech sector. If you do not have an outward-facing business, this may not be a good tool for you unless you can really leverage your blog to build a niche rather than just trying to slot into in existing one.

smiaras

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growler

just had a look at your site Hels Belle ( nice) and your business ( being so niche) is perfect for this kind of promotion, I guess i'm coming at this from a more b2b / technology / fmcg angle where I suspect blogs have less impact. Its good for you because you are less likely to have numerous dissatisfied customers, interaction with the public ( while great in theory) for a larger business is risky unless you have the resources to ensure top quality of service, as you don't want to have negative feedback in the public domain.

Hope business is good !!

growler

smiaras wrote:

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smiaras, in my experience ( again this is from the perspective of b2b / tech ) ranking anywhere on the second page would be a waste of time, when working with / in SEO agencies we found that the difference in traffic from being in the top 5 - 10 results to being in the second 15-30 was enormous, by a factor of 5 or 6. If you were to invest in adwords / or do some SEO work then you would expect to see a dramatic increase in traffic, of course whether that translates into cash is another matter.

smiaras

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growler

smiaras, bear with me here. Admittedly I know feck all about blogging and personally wouldn't ever bother taking the time to write one of my own. But, your blog tells me where you work and although you have a disclaimer regarding your opinions etc. IF a potential client was to look for your employer and through some combination of keywords happens across your site before the official site, what if they take umbrage with some of the opinions you express, dislike your thoughts on celebrity PR or a book review is that not a risk for your business ?

What if you leave your employer and decide to share your thoughts on some of their internal workings ?

I could see why, if I were the owner, I would be a bit wary of you being a public face of the company. I don't know you, you may be the most trustworthy and ethical person in Ireland ( though you wouldn't be in PR then ;-) ) but would you not think there is an inherent risk ?

I dont think this applies to Hels Belle as, i think, her blog is part of her own business.

What do you think ? sorry for wandering OT a bit.

smiaras

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Hells_Belle

growler wrote:

just had a look at your site Hels Belle ( nice) and your business ( being so niche) is perfect for this kind of promotion,

Cheers, glad you like the site and the blog. I'm having a lot of fun with both.

I guess i'm coming at this from a more b2b / technology / fmcg angle where I suspect blogs have less impact. Its good for you because you are less likely to have numerous dissatisfied customers, interaction with the public ( while great in theory) for a larger business is risky unless you have the resources to ensure top quality of service, as you don't want to have negative feedback in the public domain.

My friend, I point you to The Cluetrain. Personally, I would say that if you're afraid to talk to your customers, and afraid to have your customers talking about you, then you either have too much distance in an unevolved business, or a very serious quality control problem.

Hope business is good !!

Thanks! Me too

growler

I've read the Cluetrain Manifesto and I fully agree that *theoretically* it's great concept and ideal for any business to aim for, however, the reality for most businesses that I have worked with is that they cannot financially justify the investment in technologies, personnel and control of the message to make it work.

I can see some businesses where it could work very well, but, if you take a business which has customers numbering millions and does have serious quality control issues / the potential for things to go wrong regularly : airlines, transport, complex consumer oriented technologies, telephony, ISPs, self build furniture etc. some of which are beyond the control of the service provider, then traditional customer service often fails to keep the customer satisfied in the event of complaints, even more pervasive communication channels with the business would require huge resources to address all customer issues.

The other issue, for me, is how to train and keep staff that can be consistently excellent in their dealings with customers, and providing them with the tools to satisfactorily address all customer issues. Since most customer service (when not based in Dehli) employs people at close to minimum wage you simply cannot justify the expense of having experts dealing with individual customers when it makes more sense to have them working on rectifying problems that are prioritised based on cost/ benefit analysis done by the business with input from the business's CRM systems. Most businesses accept that they will inevitably lose customers when things go wrong (except Iarnrod Eireann) and although we all know the maxim that it is cheaper to keep an existing customer than to gain a new one, the investments necessary to keep all / most of your "at risk" customers is very expensive / unprofitable in the short term. I don't think one size fits all, what may be appropriate and profitable for one business may not be for another.

smiaras

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edbyrne

growler wrote:

smiaras, in my experience ( again this is from the perspective of b2b / tech ) ranking anywhere on the second page would be a waste of time, when working with / in SEO agencies we found that the difference in traffic from being in the top 5 - 10 results to being in the second 15-30 was enormous, by a factor of 5 or 6. If you were to invest in adwords / or do some SEO work then you would expect to see a dramatic increase in traffic, of course whether that translates into cash is another matter.

SEO is great, of course, but results are not guaranteed. Optimising your site code will help, but only a little. The best SEO is GOOD, RELEVANT, and REGULARLY updated content. (That's a blog, by the way).

You're dead right - being in the top 5 Google results will massively increase your traffic, but no amount of code optimisation will get you there. It's page rank and link popularity. The best way to build both of those is have a great site that people bookmark.

Hells_Belle

edbyrne wrote:

You're dead right - being in the top 5 Google results will massively increase your traffic, but no amount of code optimisation will get you there.

I disagree. I think optimised code makes a *huge* amount of difference. I just overhauled two sites for a client selling umbrellas and wellies. Her sites do brilliantly for two word phrases, with #1 - #5 rankings for almost all products - sometimes #1 through #5 between the two sites.

She's got a retail site. She has no inbound links. She's now rockin' Google and is about to drop her AdSense campaign. Why pay for Google listings when you can have them for free?

This does not negate the importance of blogs, which I (obviously) think have a really important role to play. But if forced to choose, I will always overhaul a client site for SEO rather than adding a blog. You get way more bang for your buck.

edbyrne

Sorry, you'll never persuade me that code alone will drastically improve your search rankings. It's important, of course, but SEO is not Site CODE Optimisation - it's Search Engine Optimisation - which means:

- Code
- Content (keyword focussed and regularly updated)
- Inbound Links

But heh, if you're getting results that's great. But I'd be worried about the longevity of that ranking with nothing holding you there other than optimised code.

growler

Hells_Belle wrote:

I disagree. I think optimised code makes a *huge* amount of difference. I just overhauled two sites for a client selling umbrellas and wellies. Her sites do brilliantly for two word phrases, with #1 - #5 rankings for almost all products - sometimes #1 through #5 between the two sites.

She's got a retail site. She has no inbound links. She's now rockin' Google and is about to drop her AdSense campaign. Why pay for Google listings when you can have them for free?

This does not negate the importance of blogs, which I (obviously) think have a really important role to play. But if forced to choose, I will always overhaul a client site for SEO rather than adding a blog. You get way more bang for your buck.

don't her rankings for these phrases reflect the lack of sophistication of her competitors as much as it reflects the use of code in isolation? you know that you could create a site that would outrank her no problem.

magpie

Getting that #1 listing for "Warhol Umbrella" has long been the holy grail of SEOs. Congratulations on your ultimate victory.

Hells_Belle

magpie wrote:

Getting that #1 listing for "Warhol Umbrella" has long been the holy grail of SEOs. Congratulations on your ultimate victory.

WTF? She sells umbrellas and wellies - what did you think the search results were going to be for, "online dating"? I used this client as an example because I was illustrating the point that investing in your site can pay better dividends than investing in AdWords. She used to advertise with that phrase and others that she's now been able to drop. That's all. It certainly wasn't intended to be a "victory" dance of any kind.

magpie

I've recently optimised this site for my client who sells Lobster Clocks and they're now rocking the google , beating off the myriad other retailers of lobster clocks and thus proving that Optimisation is king.

Of course I might be proving my point slightly more effectively if I had got someone to #1 for something where there's actual competition, like Online Poker, but hey.

Now for my optimisation of the "Model Cactus Carved from Cheese" distibutors website...

Hells_Belle

Sigh. Look, this woman came to me because she had a website, she had competitors, and her competitors were showing up first in Google and she was pages behind. I did my thing, and her Google results improved dramatically. She's happy, I'm happy.

And frankly, if you did sell lobster clocks, redid you site and moved up to #1, you'd be a very happy lobster clock seller.

My entire point was: optimisation does make a difference. I think it's more important than AdWords. YMMV, and obviously does.

magpie

You really can find anything on the interweb -

http://www.tonyolivo.com/pics/CheeseHorse.jpg

Yes, its a cheese sculpture of a cactus and a horse.

Sigh

I know that feeling

edbyrne

hells_belle ... I not arguing with you - of course SEO makes a difference. All I'm saying is that for even a reasonably competitive term SEO has to mean more than code optimisation - it means LINK POPULARITY and CONTENT. But I consider part of the SEO service anyway - and code optimisation to be the smallest and easiest (least time consuming I mean) part!

mneylon

There's a lot of ways to market and SEO is only part of it.

Blogging may work for some people and business, but you may also end up creating problems for yourself

turbot

Whoever wrote that the warhol umbrella site got to no 1 without any link popularity has obviously never read up on the algorithms driving Google, which are totally designed around link popularity. Sounds like folklore to me.
Have you actually checked out their true number of inbound links?

For example, the two sites in the top 10 in Google for Warhol Umbrella,
umbrellaart.co.uk and wellieart.co.uk have 59 and 10 links listed within Google.
However, in AltaVista, there are 217 and 176 respectively. Just because these links don't show in Google, doesn't mean that Google has never spidered any, nor that these volumes have no effect on the visible rankings.

I got one of my clients into the top 5 into Google World for their most valuable keyphrases in Google and have mostly maintained these rankings.

Link popularity counts a lot.

- Thomas

magpie

Blogging may work for some people and business, but you may also end up creating problems for yourself

Is there any truth that one of the effects of the Jagger update on google is that any inbound links from blogs don't count for shizzle? Presumably because of all those gobsh1tes who post spam links all over the place. Its somewhat annoying for those people who've spent ages building up a blog filled with relevant content.